In object oriented programming languages, determining information about a class of an object from an object pointer can consume a large amount of performance resources. FIG. 1 is a block diagram illustrating a relationship between an object pointer, an object, and a class structure. Object pointer 102 includes a virtual memory address of object 104. Object 104 contains information associated with the object and includes a pointer to class structure 106 associated with the class of object 104. For each class in a program, there exists only one class structure. Objects belonging to the same class contain the same pointer to the same class structure. Class structure 106 includes information associated with an object class. Given a pointer of an object, it is often desired to determine if the class of the object associated with the pointer belongs to a known class. Since class structure pointers refer to the only class structure of a class, the value of a class structure pointer can be used as an identifier to compare object classes. An object is stored in memory using the given object pointer, and the class structure pointer is obtained from the object. The obtained class structure pointer is compared with a known class structure pointer value to determine if the class of the object associated with the given object pointer is same as the class associated with the known class object pointer value. This comparison process can consume a large amount of performance resources. Loading the object using the given object pointer usually produces a cold cache miss, causing misses in every cache level. A large number of clocks cycles are wasted as the object is brought into the cache from main memory. Since class comparisons are very common operations in object oriented language programs, it is desirable to speed up class comparison operations. Therefore, there exists a need for a more efficient way to obtain data associated with a class of an object.